You've
photon-torpedoed the Saurians' space fleet into subatomic particles,
crushed the Nazi war machine as it rolled across Europe, and mapped
every maze from Sosaria to Skara Brae. Now what?
If it's a real challenge you're after, try writing
your own computer game. No programming experience, you say? Don't
worry. Open one of these game construction sets and you open the door
to a limitless variety of custom arcade, adventure, and war games.
Some game construction sets are like Tinkertoy sets,
but with icons instead of dowels; you simply grab and position the
icons to build a game. A few are more elaborate; you use a specialized
form of BASIC to create your gaming masterpiece. And a growing chorus
of games provide scenario builders that let you plant trees and
mountains where you want, decide how many tanks the evil enemy
commands, or scatter magic scrolls and potions across a fantasy land.
Be forewarned, though: After you've hammered
together your own game or scenario, you probably won't have as much fun
playing it as you did designing it. The fun comes in watching someone
else play your game.
Choose a package and become a game designer, game
programmer, and game publisher. Ah, the wonders of computers!

ARCADE
GAME CONSTRUCTION KIT
Adopting a Hollywood approach to game construction, Arcade Game Construction Kit calls
animated objects Actors and
the background Scenery.
Hopping among four editors-Environment, Level,
Actor, and Sound-you can create surprisingly well-animated ladder
games, maze games, and shoot-'em-ups for one to four players. The
joystick-based interface consists of pull-down menus and pop-up
windows, the latter offering push buttons for most choices and sliders
for setting variables such as speed or volume. Some commands may be
made from the keyboard, and function keys support frequently used
commands. The game-design process consists of picking items from each
editor's parts boxes and modifying their actions and interactions
before placing them on the screen.
You first decide on things such as screen colors, the effects of
gravity, and the number of lives a player will have at the start of the
game. Then the Scenery editor puts the magic wand in your hand and
grants you free reign over the characteristics of background objects,
the 4 X 8 pixel blocks whose attributes may be altered to suit your
needs. You might make one a ladder, another a conveyor belt, and a
third a teleporter. The graphics for blocks may be edited, and you can
create new blocks and store them in a parts box. Blocks can be easily
copied, making it a simple task to build a wall by designing one brick
and then duplicating it. Movable objects may also be added, allowing
you to create action-style quests along the lines of Gauntlet.
The Actor editor facilitates picking icons to
represent the spaceships or monsters that will attack the player. There
are Sentry Actors, which follow a path you lay out around the screen;
Drones, who always move in the same direction; and Computer Actors, who
rely on artificial intelligence to change direction and chase the
player. And since it wouldn't be much of a shoot-'em-up without
missiles, they can be added, replete with appropriate sound effects.
Speeds, patterns, and other Actor characteristics can all be altered.
By writing a simple F/X Script, you can drop in
special effects. The Actors and Scenery Blocks communicate via four
channels, somewhat like phone lines. By sending cues back and forth on
these channels, you can surprise the player with unexpected actions. Be Barrier, for example, tells a
Scenery Block to act like a wall while the cue is on, and Be Deadly
tells it to kill an Actor. By setting a block as a Switch, you can
transform it from, say, a ladder to a man-eating plant.
Sound effects and animation are easy to orchestrate,
rounding out a versatile construction set with almost unlimited
potential. If a game is to be played in conjunction with the master
program, it can hold as many as 50 levels, while a gift disk game can
be played without Arcade Game
Construction Kit but is limited to 15
levels. Unlike most construction sets, which require you to save your
work and test a copy, you can play a single round to fine-tune your
design. This streamlines an otherwise often tedious and time-consuming
process. The lucid 80-page manual is interspersed with design tips from
the system's programmer, and the six games on the disk give you
something to play right away and can serve as subjects for your first
game-editing effort.

Arcade
Game Construction Kit

Computers: Apple II, Commodore 64/128
Best Feature: Switch blocks can transform objects in the middle of a
game
Included Games: Six
Best Creation: Shoot-'em-ups

Too Lazy to Roll Your Own?

You don't
have to design games to get your money's worth from a
construction set or scenario, for the people who do roll their own are
more than willing to share their creations. Here are some sources to
get you started on your quest for quests.Online services. Among
the best sources for
user-created games and scenarios are the online information services
such as CompuServe, GEnie, and QuantumLink. Local bulletin boards are
also worth checking out.
On CompuServe, look to the Gamers Forums Libraries;
on QLink, go to the Commodore Software Showcase, the Software Support
Center, and the Electronic Arts Enhancement Library.
I recently located scenarios on CompuServe and GEnie
for Paladin, Breach, War Game Construction Set, Pinball Construction
Set, and World Builder.
A quick look into QuantumLink (a
Commodore
64/128 service) revealed racetracks for Racing Destruction Set and
mazes for Demon Stalker (both also on CompuServe), plus a number of
character editors for Ultima and
Phantasie.
And QuantumLink is planning a special department to
support Arcade Game Construction Kit.The ACS Club. This group
maintains libraries of Adventure
Construction Set games
for all systems and publishes a
newsletter on game design. Individual games cost $5.00 each, while
members get two for $5.00; you can also trade an original one for two
adventures. Contact Ken St. André, ACS Fan Club, 3421 East Yale,
Phoenix, Arizona 85008.Adventure Game Toolkit.
Games may be obtained from
the manufacturer: $6.00 for as many as will fit on a disk (the games
are also on CompuServe). Look for one called Star Portal.Breach and Paladin.
Modern Day Publishing puts out
two newsletters-"VidComm" covers scenarios and design tips for Breach,
while "Legends" is devoted to Paladin.
With a subscription to either
newsletter, you get a disk containing 15 scenarios. This is also the
best source for collections of shareware: For $7.95-$15.95, you can get
gamer-created scenarios for both games. And the company has produced
two disks of its own: The Secrets of
Anforra, with 30 quests for Paladin
($15.95), and Warmaster,
with 15 quests ($8.95).
Contact Modern
Day Publishing, 10822 Copperfield Drive, Pineville, North Carolina
28134.SSG games. Strategic
Studies Group publishes RUN5, a
magazine with instructions for recreating user-designed scenarios for
its most popular war games. Contact SSG, 1747 Orleans Court, Walnut
Creek, California 94598.Questbusters. This
newsletter covers all aspects of
adventure gaming, including construction efforts. Ads in the
"Questbusters" newsletter Swap Shop section are particularly useful
they're a gold mine for anyone looking for a character editor. Contact
Questbusters, P.O. Box 32698, Tucson, Arizona 85751.

Tips on Game Design
Arcade-Game ConstructionMike
Livesay, Program Designer1. When
you first start, use the Environment Editor to set the effects
of gravity, to determine whether the screen wraps around, to select
colors, and to set other aspects:2. Do the
graphics for the actors first so that you can get a feel for
what they look like before setting their attributes.3. Use
switch-mode blocks to replace one block with another; chaining
such switches can produce animated effects.4. Use the
Sentry often: It executes quickly and won't bog down the
game.5. Trace a
path for the Sentries to follow (to duplicate PacMan-style
ghost movements).

World
BuilderWilliam
Appleton Designer and Programmer of World Builder and Enchanted
Scepters1. Use the
draw graphics as much as possible to conserve disk space;
use bitmaps only when you need details.2. Recycle
objects and characters so that your world doesn't use up the
allowable number of objects and characters.3. To
create a peaceful character, make it an object instead of a
character. Replace the object with a character if it becomes aggressive
or is killed.4.
Generate animation by exchanging objects with move commands, such
as replacing a closed door with an open one.5. Search
for partial string responses with the parser so
that your game will recognize player intent with
just a couple of words.6. Use
play testers to ensure that you've included responses for the
most commonly entered text.

War
Game Construction SetRoger
Damon, Program Designer1. Don't
take things at face value: What's important is not what a uinit is
called or what it looks like, but its capabilities and the
effects different terrain has on it.2. Look
for ways to twist the rules. Just because an icon looks like a
tank doesn't mean it has to act like one. You could use a tank icon but
set its unit type as helicopter and create a hovercraft.3.
Engineers can turn an impassable square into a passable one. Use
this trait in your game: Make an obstacle the players have to get
through-maybe barbed wire.4. Have
fresh units pop up in the middle of the battle, even behind
enemy lines, as in guerrilla warfare.5. Some
terrain types, such as water, are impassable to certain units.
Use a water icon and draw a maze on land; then change the water's color
to light green, matching the land: It will become an invisible maze.

Adventure
Construction SetKen
St. André, Co-Designer of Wasteland, President of ACS Club1. Making
a good adventure is like writing a novel: It can't be done in
one day. Patience and planning are essential. Plan on work sessions
lasting one to three hours, and work on one region at a time.2. Make
lists of necessary items and creatures before getting deeply
involved in the game.3. Make as
many changes as you can at one time when customizing your
character set.4. Build a
character-customizing room on one disk, where you can set up
characters designed especially for your game. The customizing room
should have blocks rigged with spells that boost a character's
strength, constitution, and so on when it bumps into them. When the
character is ready, transfer it into the game.5. Choose
the most effective room border, even if that means no border
at all. With the background black, an empty border looks perfect for a
dark cave or the depths of space.6. To
effectively double a room's size, take out one wail and
completely replace it with invisible doors.

WAR
GAME CONSTRUCTION
SETGames created with War Game Construction Set put one
or two players at
the head of tank, infantry, truck, and other military units. With
joystick or keyboard, you select units and give them firing
instructions or marching orders (in four directions, not the eight
permitted in more complex war games); the computer opponent responds
likewise. The map scrolls, and a zoom option presents a close-up of the
immediate area. Limited sound effects bolster the action, though your
only option is sound or no sound.
You draw the game map by selecting and setting
terrain icons that depict mountains, roads, rivers, and other landscape
features on a blank map. (You may also edit the eight games included
with the program.) One handy option lets you print your map, which
depicts roads, borders, and other features with ASCII characters.
Troops are edited by calling up a text screen that lists attributes
such as Firepower, Defense, and Movement. You can pick an icon to
represent each unit, but you can't draw your own. It is possible, and
very useful, to change the unit's name. A duplication feature saves
time when you need more than one of the same kind of unit.
Icons include swordsmen and other adventurous types
as well as the expected tanks and soldiers, so you can design
role-playing games (though you can't include logical puzzles) and
recreate a variety of historical battles. Or generate totally
off-the-wall games: How about the War of the Sexes, pitting Amazon
warriors against hordes of Rambos?
The War Game
Construction Set system is flexible in
terms of the scope of the battle you can design: Four combat levels
range from man-to-man-where icons represent in dividual soldiers-to
large-scale affairs, where they depict squads, divisions, or
battalions. Each side can have as many as 31 units on the battlefield;
you can even add offscreen artillery whose targets are determined
during the Fire phase. The detailed 28-page manual offers tricks and
suggestions for game design and includes tables and charts describing
the effects of terrain on various kinds of units.War Game
Construction Set is easy enough to
learn-actually more so than many of SSI's war games-and capable of
producing some near-professional-quality games.

ADVENTURE
CONSTRUCTION SETAdventure Construction Set is more a
role-playing-game construction set
than anything else; games you'll create with it play more like Ultima
than like Zork.
Characters are illustrated with icons that move about
an aerial-view map of a fantasy world or the interior of indoor
locations; game decisions are made with joystick or mouse rather than
by typing commands. Up to four people can play, each with a different
character icon. Each game takes place on a world map 40 X 40 squares in
size. By entering doors scattered about the main map, your character
ventures into towns, castles, and so on to collect weapons, magic
scrolls, and other gear. Some aspects of combat are minimally animated,
and sound effects and brief tunes enhance the action. A game's world
map can contain as many as 15 map regions, each with 16 rooms, 300
props, and 335 text messages. Adventure
Construction Set comes with
seven mini adventures that you can play or use to familiarize yourself
with the game system before setting out to conjure up your own
mythological amusements.
You'll do so by accessing a collection of menus that
look like a gear-shift pattern: Options in each of the three main menus
are connected with lines, and you move the cursor with mouse or
joystick around the pattern until it's over the appropriate option;
then you hit the button. Mini menus at the bottom of the screen lead
you farther into the command structure.
Using the menu system, you can create terrain,
monsters, weapons, and other items. Magic spells empower characters
with fantastic abilities, and custom text messages let you tell a story
and give clues to the player.Adventure
Construction Set consists of three
different construction sets: fantasy, science fiction, and mystery.
Each has a unique set of graphics and sounds. If you don't like the
hundreds of provided pictures of creatures, people, weapons, and
objects, you can edit them or draw originals from scratch. You can edit
the games included with the program (one of which serves as an online
tutorial that supplements the 43-page manual). But it takes solid
planning and long hours of play testing and fine-tuning to fabricate a
satisfying game. Fortunately, if you tire halfway through the creation
process, Adventure Construction Set
can even complete the game for you!

WORLD
BUILDERWorld Builder, the only construction set that's
been used to develop a
commercially sold game (Enchanted
Scepters), opens the realm of
graphics adventures to would-be world makers. The program comes with an
assortment of illustrations that can be added to any location, plus a
built-in graphics program if you prefer to sketch your own pictures
(you may also import clip art and graphics drawn with other software).
Text can be embedded to describe a location, event, or response to the
player's action. With World Builder,
you can create adventures
containing as many as 2,500 locations, 32,767 objects, and 32,767
characters and sounds. Speaking of sounds, the included library of
digitized sound effects is the most amazing part of this entire system.
Because gameplay revolves around text-based
commands, World Builder games
exhibit extraordinary freedom (or at
least the potential for it) in what the player can do during an
adventure. Logic-style puzzles like those in Zork are but one
possibility, while combat and magic are also possibilities on the
game-designer's palette. During design and play, most common commands
(such as Look, Examine, and Take) can be selected from pull-down menus
or with keyboard shortcuts. Players can even examine objects displayed
on the screen by clicking on them.
Game design looks easy, since it's done in windows
with such names as Scene Map, Character List, Object List, and Sound
List. But World Builder asks
you to learn a form of BASIC that includes
common BASIC statements such as LET and THEN, as well as some
specialized commands. As you progress, you can tap the power of 234
user variables to keep track of what the player does in the game (the
player's score, amount of gold found, and so on).
To determine what happens in each location, you type
in lines of Scene Code such as IF {TEXT$=examine stone} THEN PRINT "The
stone rolls over". Until you've mastered the intricacies of the
language, you won't be able to weave a truly polished adventure from
these silicon threads. And even then, you can count on spending time
tracking down logical bugs in your code that are often harder to find
than the silver key in Zork III.
Yet it's the power of this programming
language that allows you to write top-notch adventure games.World Builder,
the sole Macintosh-only game creator
reviewed here, does use the standard Mac interface and so supports the
computer's cut and paste features. This greatly accelerates the
adventure code-writing and debugging process.
The package's 87-page manual works in conjunction
with an on-disk tutorial that gives a lucid overview of designing a
World Builder game. For those
who know some BASIC but have no idea what
to do with it, this system is especially recommended.

PINBALL
CONSTRUCTION SETPinball Construction Set is
the 1983 program that broke ground for
today's construction-set boom, but it still remains among the easiest
to use. You begin with a blank canvas-a pinball machine on one side of
the screen. The other side holds a parts box filled with icons that
stand for various game parts: the ball, flippers, kickers, bumpers, and
more. Alongside the parts box, other icons present visual programming
commands such as a hand (to drag objects from the parts box to the
pinball machine) and a globe (to change the effects of gravity). When
you play, the parts box is replaced by the score displays, which track
the hits and misses of as many as four players. The animation and sound
effects are so crisp and entertaining, the interface so easy to use,
that I spent more time "researching" this construction set than I spent
with any of the others.
It's the ability to dynamically customize new shapes
that permits you to bring your visions to life so readily with Pinball
Construction Set. Even the playing surface may be reshaped. You
can
also paint assorted elements of the game pixel by pixel and then don
the musical director's hat and pick sound effects to accompany each
target. When you've finished designing your game, you might work with
the magnify and paint options to emblazon a name across its top. I
called mine "Pinhead Pinball."
The 14-page manual could be improved, for it neither
offers a tutorial nor provides a single illustration of a design in
progress, just pictures of the icons and their definitions. Five
prebuilt games are included and may be edited. You don't need Pinball
Construction Set to play a game you've made with it, so you can
share
your original pinball machines.

SCENARIO
BUILDERS AND CHARACTER EDITORSPaladin, a tactics-oriented
role-playing game, includes QuestBuilder, a
good example of a scenario builder. One window holds a blank map;
another, a set of icons for terrain types. First you click on a terrain
icon (wooden floorboards, perhaps) and then on the map square you want
to cover with it. A pull-down menu lets you shift from indoor icons to
those for outdoor terrain, opponents, objects, and other building
blocks. This scenario builder also gives you an opportunity to select
the goal of a quest: Find a certain number of scrolls, wipe out the
enemy orcs and dragons, or simply get out alive.
This customizing of already-created games was
popularized by war games, though few are as designer-friendly as
Paladin. Check out such
packages as Mech Brigade, Demon
Stalker,
Roadwar 2000, The Ancient Art
of
War, Europe Ablaze, Battles of
Napoleon, Warship, American Civil War I and II, and Halls of Montezuma
for more games equipped with scenario builders.
But scenario builders broke out of the war-game mold
in the past few years. With Racing
Destruction Set, a one- or two-
player slot-car racing game, you modify the cars' capabilities and lay
out your own courses. Lode Runner's
Game Generator lets you handcraft
your own ladders-and-mazes game. In Mean
18, your golf course-designing
talents will be tested. Rack' Em
puts you in charge of hatching new
bumper-pool table layouts. (The funniest scenario builder I've seen is
in Grand Slam Bridge, with
its design-your-own-hand capability.)
Related to scenario builders, character editors are
utilities that alter the status of your party members in games such as
Ultima and Wizardry, allowing you to instantly
turn a 90 pound weakling
into a weight lifter. Major software companies don't market these
character editors; these programs are usually found on national and
local bulletin boards or are sold by individuals or small mail-order
companies. Although it may seem like a good idea, a character editor
can easily spoil a game, since building up your party is half the fun.

THE
FUTURE OF CONSTRUCTION SETS?
The next thing to look for, though it may be a couple of years off, is
some sort of flight-simulator construction set. Designers say that the
technology for such a game already exists, but that the main problem
would be bringing the programmers of these two diverse software types
together.
Another possibility would be the "Construction
Construction Set" that Bill Budge (Pinball
Construction Set author)
talked about a couple of years ago. That may be even less likely to
materialize than a set for designing and test-flying your own jet
planes, but in today's high-flying world of construction sets, the
sky's still the limit.Shay Addams is the
editor and publisher of "Questbusters," a popular
newsletter devoted to adventure gaming, and the author of numerous
books and articles about electronic entertainment.